Preservation Technology Podcasts (U.S. National Park Service)

Episodes

July 4, 2023

132. Stories of Colorado Women Serving in WWII

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gail Beaton: Gail Beaton.

Catherine Cooper: So Gail, could you tell us what led you to deep dive into the history of Colorado women during World War II?

Gail Beaton: Well, I've always been fascinated with World War II and especially the Rosie the Riveter character, and then when I was a high school teacher, I wanted to present the home front to the students in a manner that would be very interesting to them. So I developed a character called Gail Murphy, who's a bullet maker in Denver during the war. One of our facilities here used to be a Remington arms plant, so I gave this presentation for years to my students, and then it kind of exploded on me and I started giving it to all sorts of organizations throughout the state. And one time in 2014, I was giving it to a 1940s Forever group, and a woman came up afterwards and said she loved the presentation, but I didn't say anything about the army nurses, and I said, "You're right. I concentrated more on the home front and just barely mentioned women in the military."

Didn't even say anything about the army nurses. So I said, "Were you an army nurse?" And she's like, "Well, yes, I was in France and Germany during the war," so I said, "Could I please interview you?" And she agreed, and after several hours I thought, “these stories have to be told.” I mean, there was so much I had no idea about that it was time for somebody to find out and tell the stories. So that's kind of how I got into it.

Catherine Cooper: Could you explain how you chose to create the umbrella of “Colorado” for Colorado women?

Gail Beaton: I was interviewing and finding more stories, I realized that there were women here in Colorado that maybe were from Tennessee and never touched base in Colorado until after the war, and I thought, "Well, their stories are going to be missed. A Tennessee historian probably isn't going to track them down in Colorado, so I need to include their stories too." So I kind of expanded into those who also were in Colorado perhaps after the war.

Catherine Cooper: How did you chase down all of these histories; how did you conduct the search?

Gail Beaton: A lot of it was done through the internet. Fortunately, many things are now digitized. Of course, I went to museums and archival collections throughout the state. There's oral history collections at the Library of Congress. The University of North Carolina has a wonderful one on women veterans. Of course, I looked at, it felt like all the books on the women in the Air Force, service pilots or defense plants, all the general books that one would expect. And then I found women through a number of different sources. One woman I interviewed that I'd met through a presentation actually was talking to a woman at her hairdresser and found out the woman was a cryptanalyst during the war. So there were all sorts of little avenues that I was able to make.

Of course, I did tons of reading between transcripts and newspaper articles, obituaries, the census records, ancestry.com, diaries, letters, so a lot of different sources were used. I chose the vignettes trying to show the breadth and depth of Colorado experiences. So I tried to get vignettes that were women from the eastern plains and the Western Slope as well as the front range. I tried to include Anglo women, Latinas, African American women, even a woman from Eastern Europe. So that was one reason to include the different vignettes, especially at the beginning of the book. I actually was able, I think, to make sure that I got all my favorite stories in there. Some of them, I had to push a little hard with the editor and the reviewers, but I managed to hold my line on that.

Catherine Cooper: You’ve organized the book by field of service; could you talk about how and why you chose that particular strategy?

Gail Beaton: It just seemed logical to me to split the women into the three major areas of their contributions, women in the military, and then on the defense plants and then in volunteer activities. In doing the military, a number of people said, "Just combine the Army Nurse Corps and the Navy Nurse Corps because they're military nurse corps," but they actually had very different experiences during the war, and so I wanted to split them out.

And then also it just seemed logical to me, I guess maybe I was thinking that the military women were so unusual. Let's start off with them. Then I organized them according to when that particular branch was organized. So the Army and Navy Nurse Corps were before World War II and then followed by the WAACs, which were the first ones with the Army Corps in 1942. Then I guess I chose the second most unusual, and that would be the defense plants. And then the third, the women on the home front was kind of typically women's work or women's jobs doing volunteer activities, whatever war it is or peace time, that seems to be something that women are especially told in to do is volunteer work. I also wanted to highlight a woman in each chapter so that the beginning of every chapter would highlight a woman and her experiences in that particular branch or volunteer activity and things like that. Again, trying to show the diversity of Colorado women and their experiences.

Catherine Cooper: Who do you hope reads the book and what would you like them to take away from it?

Gail Beaton: Obviously, I'd like everyone to read the book. I know that's not going to happen, but I think first and foremost, I would like that the children and grandchildren of this greatest generation read the book because I think it's very important for them to understand what women did during the war and their male relatives also. I put in the end of the introduction that when a person dies, it's as if a library burns, and I really feel that's true, and in writing the book, I interviewed a couple dozen women and a couple of men, and by the time I was done and the book was published, 10 of those had passed away. And then since then, two more have passed away. So I'm kind of down to three surviving women. This really saddens me, and so I hope that the children and the grandchildren would find out their parents or grandparents stories before they're gone, and then I'd like the younger generations to read it and kind of come away with two main ideas.

One is that women can meet any challenge. They just need to be given the chance and they need to grab the chance or force the opportunity. And secondly, I'd like them to know that Americans can set aside our differences economically, politically, social differences, and actually come together and do some pretty great things and accomplish a lot. So I think those are kind of my two main goals in it, and it's why I continue to do my Rosie character and do book talks and things because I think it's important. These women meant so much to me that I think it's important for their stories to be told. Rosie has changed so much, and I have gotten so many new things. First started out to be a 30 minute, "This is what bullet makers do and other women are doing other things," but now I can talk about the all-girl orchestra from Denver that traveled through the United States.

I can talk about women that were crop dusters during the war because the men aren't being crop dusters in Oklahoma. So it's made me so proud to know just the great things that women have done, and so many of these women that I interviewed became friends. My army nurse that kind of sparked this whole book just passed away in July at 100 years and one week, so I saw her two or three times a year until COVID, of course. And so they were always so humble. “We just did it.” “It wasn't a big deal.” “I'm proud of what I did, but it was just they asked us to serve, we served.” “They asked us to not go to school for the first two weeks of our senior year to pick skins off of peaches. We did it. We went back to school.” So it's made me very appreciative.

It's made me very proud. I think one thing that also really hit me is how much these women went through. We're sitting here in 10 degrees weather today, and I think of these women working on airplanes outside fixing the bomb mechanism and women who are washing their hair in a helmet out in Europe in the coldest winter in 1944 and 45. It amazes me, and I have to stop and think, "This is just amazing that these women did these things and I know their male counterparts went through the same thing also." Just the physical deprivations that they also went through as well. We also don't think about women with PTSD and things of that nature until we look at our recent female veterans, but the women I talked to went through a lot of that also and found that they couldn't talk to people about their war experiences, especially in the military.

Catherine Cooper: What would you recommend to people about trying to capture a bit more of these libraries before we lose them for the people in their lives?

Gail Beaton: I think if they would just ask them to maybe bring out the scrapbooks photographs, that generation has them. They're not on their phones, and that's what these women did for me. They brought out their yearbooks and their photographs and their medals and things like that, and let me pour over them and ask them questions. I think if you just get them talking, a lot of them will talk and they'll open up. Ideally, it would be wonderful if one could videotape it, but even to just have it on a recording and have that voice as it goes forward, I think as we lose our relatives, oftentimes we think, "Oh, if I just could hear their voice again," and so the women that I interviewed, I made a transcription, which was painful [transcribing is tedious work] of their oral interview, as well as DVDs to give to their families or to hold for themselves, and I think that's really valuable.

I could submit them to the Library of Congress's Veteran Oral History project. One of the gentlemen that I met in all of this regularly does that. He works up in Northern Colorado and he has gone to interview all sorts of male and female veterans for any war, and then he submits the DVD to the Library of Congress, so that would be something to do. I know a couple of the universities here also will accept those. I haven't asked the libraries, but I can't imagine that they wouldn't at least keep them in their archival things too.

Catherine Cooper: Absolutely. Gail, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Gail Beaton: You're welcome.

NCPTT's Catherine Cooper speaks with Gail Beaton about her deep dive into collecting the stories of Colorado women who served both abroad and at home during WWII.

June 20, 2023

131. Telling Stories in Museums

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Adina Langer: Adina Langer.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today, Adina. You recently published a book called Storytelling in Museums. Could you talk about how or where storytelling is in museums in the public awareness and then also in the GLAM fields [galleries, libraries, archives, and museums]?

Adina Langer: I would say that storytelling as an approach within museums has really come of age within the past 20 years or so. Museums have undergone a kind of paradigm shift from being places that are primarily concerned with connoisseurship and preservation of the most exquisite artifacts of the human experience or the natural world to one where they are primarily about education and engagement and helping people to understand their place in the world and how connecting with the past can enable them to better experience the present, to make sense of their lives. And so museums have become sites of communication, and storytelling is at the heart of that process; and GLAM fields are all related to each other in this endeavor. When I think about what museums do and where stories are captured, where they are preserved, where they are interpreted, where people make connections across that spectrum in the GLAM fields, each one has kind of a different piece of that puzzle.

So if you think about archives as sites of gathering and preservation and accessibility, the key being to make what is within a repository available to those who are seeking it, to those who can benefit from those kinds of connections. Many museums have their own archives or book special collections, same with libraries. Really it's this preservation to interpretation kind of spectrum. And then if you are on that interpretation side of things, how do you select what you are going to focus your energy on as an institution, and where do you draw your inspiration and how do you serve your community? Story gathering, storytelling, has increasingly become central to, I would say, all of the GLAM fields in that way.

The book project has its origin story. I facilitated a session at the American Alliance of Museums conference in 2016. And the topic of that conference session was personal narratives in museums, so how museums use personal stories to then engage with these larger public narratives. And that came from my own experience as a curator and museum professional having recently transitioned, relatively recently from working at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, which was engaged in a huge oral history effort and also the startup process to create its inaugural exhibition experience for the public. And I had transitioned into a role as a curator of the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University, where we were also engaged in an oral history project. And we were in the process of beginning to emphasize the narratives from that first person testimony that we were gathering, really amplifying and emphasizing that in our exhibitions and public programs. And I wanted to engage more deeply with the ethics of that. Who were we as institutions to be excerpting to some extent from people's narratives in order to engage with these much larger historical topics, to serve diverse audiences, to serve this inter-generational kind of bridge purpose, the burden of collecting contemporary history to some extent, and even older history, when you have first person narratives available to you, the burden is to make sure you get that before you can't.

And I had seen that already at the 9/11 Memorial and some of the folks that we interviewed who had been responders, survivors, had passed since I had started there in 2006. And of course, in dealing with the World War II generation, we were really approaching the end of their natural lifespan. So that pressure was on us. And then what do you do then? What is your fiduciary responsibility as an institution, as an educator in both being the memory carrier now for these people who chose to share their stories with you? And then also understanding what the next generation doesn't know, what purpose bringing in diverse narratives can have in helping them understand the past. So I didn't want it to just be me. I actually reached out back then to history Twitter or museum Twitter, which was very robust back in 2015, 2016, and found some wonderful folks to be part of that original panel. Margaret Middleton, who is an independent designer and increasingly a scholar of the LGBTQ+ experience, and especially in museums and in public history.

I had contacts from the Tenement Museum, from the 9/11 Museum, and I found wonderfully through Twitter a contact in Australia who had managed multiple museums that were dealing with World War I memory and the integration of Indigenous stories. It was a great group of people to talk through these issues together. And I felt that just that panel, that there was more to do, there was more to say. So of course, segueing into the pandemic, I remember the day getting just the normal sort of outreach from AAM, "Hey, do you have a book idea? Something you've thought about doing?" Just a proposal. So I went ahead and did that and said, basically pitched that it was the right moment to capture the state of the practice. There were so many people doing amazing things in this area, why not create a book of essays that helped to illuminate what storytelling in museums is like in the 21st century?

As we were starting to move into the sort of second-third even decade of the 21st century. When my initial pitch was accepted, they basically said, "Hey, develop this further. What are your chapters going to look like? Who's going to participate? What's the overall scope of your project? And we'll let you know if we want you to develop it into a full book." So from there, I kind of reached out through all my networks of contacts, and my goal was diversity writ large. So both from personal perspective, diversity of people's lived experience and also diversity of the kind of museum professional they were or are. Were they working in education, curation, collections, social media, even sort of museum adjacent fields that weren't necessarily just engaged in creating exhibitions, in public programs, geographical location, etc. Lucky for me, a lot of my contacts back from graduate school and from my time in New York City had moved all over the country.

So I had this sort of built in geographical diversity through that. I had a wonderful contact who I had worked with in Morocco who agreed to write a chapter about the changing museum practice in Morocco in the 21st century. And then other people gave me other people. So I ended up with a designer who's worked in the U.S. and Canada and in various countries in Asia, and Margaret Middleton had moved to the U.K. So I had a little bit of an international element to this as well by the time I gathered all of these authors together. I've worked with the National Council on Public History on their blog History @Work for over a decade. So that was kind of what gave me the confidence to say, “Hey, I can edit a book.” I've done a bunch of editing, and I'm used to working with people who live all over the place. But I had never undertaken a project this big before. There was a lot of learning involved certainly.

There has been a marked shift in the field toward looking past this notion of shared authority, which I think when I was coming up in graduate school that was kind of the watch word, institutions has a certain kind of cultural authority, and by reaching to community members, we are sharing that authority. And this is still a good thing. But moving past that even further and really homing in on what members of the community want, what they're going to get out of this relationship. It's not so much a relationship of institutional largess, but it's one of partnership. And if people want their stories to be told, how can you help facilitate that? If they don't want their stories to be told and if they don't want them told the way you've told them in the past, what's your ethical responsibility?

And a particularly powerful conversation facilitated by the National Council on Public History's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, (I'm not sure if that's exactly the name), on this notion of ethics of care, made a really strong impression on me [This event took place on July 8, 2020 on Twitter and was called “An Evening with Aleia Brown.” https://ncph.org/conference/other-programs/an-evening-with-aleia-brown-twitter-chat/]. This idea that it is more important to listen perhaps than to assume in your relationship with historical story keepers. But at the same time thinking through, “okay, well then as a museum, what are your ethical responsibilities? Who are the people who have a claim on that process?” And that includes the people who are entrusting you with their artifacts and their narratives, and those are deeply related, but also the future generations that you're holding this material for. And that you're changing your interpretation and you're looking to help people who are coming to you as a bridge between their own lived experience and that of others who they want to connect with.

They want to understand, whether that's the people of the past or people from cultures that are different from their own. So the chapters in this book all come out of that moment where there is a really deep reflection and orientation toward engaging with the institutional wrongs, certainly coming out of the pandemic and the period in 2020 when there was so much looking inward. And also looking across, and some people were calling for “death to museums,” right? This idea of “are these redeemable, these institutions?” Are they incurably colonialist? Are they incurably racist? Can you overcome your origins by playing a useful living responsible role in society today? And I can say, having written a book and connected with all of these professionals, that my hope comes from a place of seeing the deep desire among professionals to do that work and to use whatever privilege that they have in society to make the world a better place from where they are, and to repair some of the wrongs that were done to and within communities and across borders, and to do that by listening and by speaking, both.

This book is definitely for museum professionals, preservation professionals, public historians, art historians, all of us who are working in the fields using GLAM as a good basis there. But I do hope that it is accessible to people who are curious, who might not come from those fields. So that might include journalists, those who are used to covering museums in a particular way. And I've noticed this quite a bit. There's still a lot of assumptions being made in museum journalism about what kind of a hierarchy of museums there might be, the really big old institutions, are they more important than the small community institutions? And I hope that someone reading this book would see that within the field, things are changing in our understanding of what is important and of how we exist and why we exist, and people who go to museums and people who want to hear stories.

So if you've ever seen yourself in a museum and you wonder... Or you haven't seen yourself, and you wonder why, I would hope that there would be something for you in this book. And anyone who's interested in kind of that peeling back the curtain on a process. I know when I grew up, I loved going to museums. I never thought about them as places where real people work. It was sort of that magical, like, “oh, this stuff just kind of appears and oh, it's so cool.” And I think that there are still people out there and museums still do multiple studies, and they're still incredibly well trusted institutions within our society, which is increasingly challenged when it comes to trust. And so for people who want to understand how museums do what they do, this book can really provide multiple perspectives on that.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Adina.

Adina Langer: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Adina Langer about how people approach telling stories through museum exhibits.

June 6, 2023

130. Presenting challenging histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

Transcript

Catherine: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Felicia: My name is Felicia Williamson. I'm the Director of Library and Archives at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.

Catherine: Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you give us a brief introduction to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum?

Felicia: The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum started as a small museum and education center in the basement of the Jewish Community Center in North Dallas in 1984. And it really was a reaction to what many Holocaust survivors in Dallas and the surrounding area saw as a misunderstanding, or even a lack of awareness, of the Holocaust. And they really wanted a place to educate mostly school children, but also the general public about the Holocaust, and also significantly a place to memorialize their lost loved ones. Because if you think about the eighties, traveling to Eastern Europe was not easy, and for many people, they didn't know potentially where their loved ones had been murdered, and there was not a place to remember or visit. And so there was a real sense of layered loss around that place. And so they established a memorial room and an education center and museum, and then that vision grew and there was a concept to move that museum and grow that museum, move it downtown into downtown Dallas, into a larger facility.

That took, I think, longer than they envisioned. And actually the new museum that we're in now opened in 2019, and we expanded to include human and civil rights, which was a really big jump. And with the understanding that the Holocaust was just a genocide of immense proportion, but also was the first time that human rights was legally recognized and protected in some ways. And tying that into our understanding of human and civil rights as a backbone, and then expanding our understanding of what does it mean to stand up for your fellow man or human, and how can we as individuals make a difference? And trying to actually embed the whole experience. So that's part of what we do. And then also trying to be a convener for tough conversations, which is another part of what we do at the museum. But that first group of Holocaust survivors was 125 people. The community was a little larger than that, but that was the group that came together then.

For a long time, the museum really was volunteer led, like many small museums, but we're professionalized now. So I'm the Director of Library and Archives, and in that position, I'm in charge of the library, which has about 3,500 volumes, and then I'm in charge of supervising and managing the oral history collection. We started recording oral histories at the very beginning. What's really cool about that is we have some of those early testimony interviews, and we've gone back and interviewed those survivors in their later years. Of course, they were already grandparents when we were interviewing them in the eighties, and now they're great-grandparents sometimes many times over, and they're much later in their elder years and have given their life even more reflection. So that's really an interesting piece of the puzzle. And so we have about 200 Holocaust interviews from North Texas Holocaust survivors, and then we have expanded our oral history collection to include human civil rights topics.

When I think about human rights, that's the human condition, and it really includes almost anything. But we do in the exhibit have 12 strands of human and civil rights that we really do want to tie that back to. Then we have 20,000 archival and artifact objects in the collection. So the foundational collection was Holocaust related, so going up until I started collecting human and civil rights in 2018, but up until then was all Holocaust related. And then of course, most of those things are archival materials, photographs, albums, letters, and so on. But now when you think about human civil rights collections, I'm getting cell phone footage of mass shootings, protest signs. It's really changed the way we collect what we collect and how for a while it was very much a traditional archives with three-dimensional objects and photos and letters. Now I'm having to expand my scope of how I deal with things, but it's exciting and good, and I have multiple donor meetings a week, and we still bring in Holocaust related collections all the time.

We brought in a journal from a litigator at the Nuremberg trial that went on display. It was really significant, we brought that in and put it on display this month. So there's still Holocaust related content coming in, and people find things from their great-grandparents or grandparents or great-uncle, that still is evolving and coming to the surface. And then the human and civil rights pieces evolve, and we're becoming more known as a convener for those conversations and collections and testimonies too. So it's all moving, but sometimes different speeds and some starts and stops, I guess.

I think in the archives world, the conversation is always based in trust. I think it is just multiplied when there's trauma at the root of that conversation with a donor or a donor's family. Same thing with an oral history interview. To get someone to share their story, you have to have a relationship built on trust to even get started. And then that's multiplied by some multiple over when there's trauma at the root of the conversation you're going to have and they need to trust that you're going to handle their story with care. Collecting Hard Histories

I think what's been interesting for me, managing the collections and then our educators working with the materials and then putting them on display. So I also manage the artifacts on display. My academic background is in the Holocaust. There's not really any way to have an academic background in the entire history of human rights. So what happens is I'll have a donor meeting or an oral history testimony, and I find myself preparing for, let's imagine the entire history of Rwanda. I don't happen to have a PhD in that. I haven't written my dissertation in that topic. But then literally that would be that morning and then that afternoon I might have a meeting preparing for a donor meeting or an oral history testimony meeting with someone who was involved with escaping the Cambodian genocide. Well, again, you could have written five books about that topic and still have lots to learn.

So that has been a real adjustment, and by no means would I ever in a million years claim to understand the Holocaust. That topic is so immense. But I am more prepared and conversant in general on that topic because that is my academic background. And so it has put me kind of really in a situation where I want to learn more and be more conversant and prepared. And I also want to understand the communities I'm working with more. And then there's also a sense of how recent some of the trauma is. So if you have a Holocaust survivor, it's generally 75 plus years since the trauma. So the current survivors were children, which brings its own challenges. So if they're still alive, there were children when this trauma occurred and that, again, has its own challenges. And our team has been working with these individuals very carefully and professionally for a while now.

But when you have someone who, for example, was involved with a mass shooting here in Dallas a few years ago, or was a refugee from a recent crisis. That is a much more recent trauma and it's much more likely that they are talking to me about this for the very first time that they've ever talked about it. Now, it does happen that someone talks about the Holocaust for the first time in our offices, but it's just much more likely with these more recent traumas. So you just have to be really cognizant of that and prepared, and you can't really be prepared for everything that's going to happen. We do a process where we do a pre-interview where we try to understand the basic outline of someone's story so you can ask the questions that have meaning for the individual and for the historical context that you want to gather.

And I had done that in the course of the interview, the interviewee revealed something that was 10 time more traumatic than he had revealed in the pre-interview. Which I think is actually not uncommon and not a bad thing, and it was extremely powerful and also significant historically. But again, how do you prepare for that? That's impossible and it's not like you can plan. That's challenging. And again, instead of that interview taking an hour and a half, it took four hours. That's another thing when you're thinking about managing a department and time and resources and things like that. So some of that is just really challenging. Until you've built a museum, I don't think it ever really occurs to you. The theory is that you are prepared to present a topic to someone with a PhD or with a seventh grade reading level. All of that is compounded by the subjects we're trying to present, which is, I would argue some of the hardest subject matter that could ever be condensed into 16,000 square feet, which is the exhibit space that we have.

One of the things that's always struck me is I have a degree in history. You're taught to write to the level of 15 pages, 20 pages, but when you get into professional life, my bosses never want to see anything longer than one page. And if you're writing for museums, it better not be longer than a paragraph. And if you're writing for exhibit copy, it has to be extremely compelling to be longer than a sentence. So then you have to take all that learning you've had and unlearn it. Then you have to get these extremely complex subjects, and you can't assume anything about what people know and understand about these complex histories. Condense it way, way, way down, ax 90% of what you want to tell people. Then simplify the language without making it condescending and then present it and hope that they leave with maybe 10% of what you are trying to present, not because anybody coming through our doors is unable to understand the concepts, but because no one going into a museum is able to retain everything, me included. I mean, I'm a deep diver. I'm a museum junkie. It's just human nature. You can't digest that whole bunch of information.

So it's really hard to take all of that. What I do is look at artifacts as a way to connect, grab attention and help convey a challenging part of that history in a way that helps people make sense of something that's almost impossible to make sense of. One of the artifacts we have in the museum that people talk about a lot is a backpack that was worn by someone in the Kindertransport. We hear about that a lot, I think, because everyone sends their kids off to school with a backpack on, and the kids look at it and they're like, "Oh, I know what that is." And then they know, "Okay, that was a kid. Well, I'm a kid." And then the parents look at that and they say, "That's a kid that someone had to send away."

And then they connect emotionally and intellectually with what that means. That means someone was so afraid that they sent their child away. So then that artifact is not just stuck in a glass case and just left there. It's helping tell the story. So that's my job, finding artifacts that help tell the story and so that they remember and it stays with them. If I find artifacts that do that, that's really the thing that matters a lot. And it's not automatic. There's lots of artifacts I love that I want to give their day in the sun. I really love them. But if they don't help tell the story of the panel work that we're trying to tell, then I can't put them in the exhibit. One thing I did when I was pivoting from being the Dallas Holocaust Museum to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and I know this isn't for everybody, I cold called the 9/11 Museum.

I just asked to speak with whoever built their collections and people were really generous. I spoke with other people who had done really front lines collecting and controversial topics. I spoke to the people who did the collecting in St. Louis after the protest there. I just called people and said, "Hi, my name is Felicia. I'm trying to pivot to collecting human rights collections. What have you done to be successful? What do you wish you'd known?" And I was humble. I didn't try to say, "Here's what I can tell you." I was very honest. I have these sets of concerns and I'm looking for help, and people are very generous with their time and spoke to me. And a big takeaway from those phone calls, which I have seen to be true and this was born out in my experience overall, is that it's always going to be about trust building. It's just harder.

If you're afraid you're going to get too many collections, that's not the fear. And that a lot of them had seen a very slow trickle that once that trust was established in the community you're working with, it would turn into a bigger wave. But that breakthrough had to happen over a longer time if there's trauma involved. And I think that's absolutely true, and that in a way, it'll seem like building those relationships will take longer and you'll have to build trust and have some positive exchanges before a more steady wave of sessions or testimonies comes in. And I've certainly seen that to be true. The other thing that's been interesting, if you think about Holocaust testimonies and even collections, it really seemed to escalate in the eighties. And if you think about legacy, that was when survivors were retiring. They're looking to their grandchildren. Holocaust survivors were not terribly interested, and they saw it as a burden. They didn't want to burden their children, but they didn't want their grandchildren to be unaware of this legacy or to not have access to this history. And so then you see these museums popping up and these collections being donated, and these oral histories being recorded when they have grandchildren. So sometimes it's not the best time to broach some of these subjects until people are ready to face it. If the history is worth preserving, then do the work. I just would encourage new professionals or younger professionals to have a creative sense of problem solving and to ask for help. If there's any defining characteristic of my life as a professional, it's that I've never been shy about asking for help. And I've been very fortunate to have received lots of help from very smart people across the field in all kinds of professional settings, whether it's academic, special collections departments, museums, all kinds of people who've really helped me along the way, offering their abilities and skills. And then I'm always willing to do the same because we're all really truly trying to get the same ball up the mountain, I think.

Catherine: Thank you so much.

Felicia: It's a pleasure.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Felicia Williamson, Director of Library and Archives at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum about collecting and presenting challenging histories.

May 23, 2023

129. 50 Years of Remembering the Up Stairs Lounge Fire

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-

Bobby Fieseler: Bobby Fieseler, and I am a journalist and queer historian, and the author of a queer history book called Tinderbox about the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans.

Catherine Cooper: Could you talk about what the Up Stairs Lounge Fire was for people who may not know the story?

Bobby Fieseler: Historically, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire was a notoriously unsolved arson fire that took place at a gay bar on the ragtag fringes of the New Orleans French Quarter. The gay bar was called The Up Stairs Lounge, and the arson claimed 32 lives. It was the deadliest fire on record in New Orleans history and the worst mass murder of homosexual Americans in 20th century America.

Yet this event, this calamity, which was very significant when it happened, received just a few days of media attention in its time, due to its queer overtones, and thus was permitted to become the historic mystery that it remains now, the way it lingers. The Up Stairs Lounge Fire is still officially an unsolved crime despite a bounty of evidence pointing towards the chief suspect: an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Roger Dale Nunez, a man ejected from the Up Stairs Lounge Fire minutes before the fire began screaming the word, "Burn," curiously enough and despite the presence of this chief suspect.

It was the Sunday night of June 24, 1973. Sunday nights were significant at the working-class gay bar called The Up Stairs Lounge. It was called the Up Stairs Lounge because it was on the second story of a building, and it was hidden from street view. You had to access it via a single staircase that was the lone entrance and exit that was winding, so you couldn't even see where you were going to as you were heading up the staircase. Sunday nights were the biggest night of the week at the Up Stairs Lounge. There was a drink special for working class gays and lesbians called the Beer Bust. It was $1 for two hours of unlimited draft beer. This was New Orleans in the '70s.

The fire itself, the calamity, was deemed a kind of political inconvenience in its time, a hot potato due to its queer overtones. That's left us where it is now. The Up Stairs Lounge Fire as an event on the map of queer history, and American history now, but it still occupies an uncertain place where people don't know how to speak about it exactly.

Catherine Cooper: You open the book with a question, and I'd love to hear your answer, what does it mean to remember?

Bobby Fieseler: This was the question that occupied me as I was writing the entire book. What is the significance of it? Is it just a recitation of facts? Do we remember for revenge? Do we remember for trauma porn so we can make ourselves feel sad or victimized in the current day and age? I settled on it in the last line of the book. The first line and the last line of books tend to have a relationship, and as an author I didn’t even mean for that to happen, but so “what does it mean to remember?” Then the last few words of Tinderbox is “speaking at last their names,” in reference to the victims.

What it means to remember for me as I've come to understand this crazy story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire that's occupied about 10 years of my life and continues to, and it's something I think about on a daily basis, is that we can't change the past by remembering it, but we can change the way we reflect upon the past through the manner in which we choose to remember it. We can reflect upon the past in a way that's nihilistic, in a way that makes us feel powerless, or we can reflect upon the past in a way that tries to honor individuals who might be our forebearers, and in a way to try to offer some sort of symbolic restitution to people who did not receive respect, or dignity, or equal rights, or equal treatment in the past.

That's what it means for me to remember. As I talk about the Up Stairs Lounge, the more that I understand it is that history, and especially queer history or human rights history, occurs in this space of malleability where there are events that transpired that are facts that predate us, that affect us all because we live in the stream of history. It's like the invisible person in the room whenever we meet and talk about queer subjects oftentimes, especially in New Orleans, the Up Stairs Lounge is just this persistent reality.

To remember it is an act of connecting ourselves to that lineage, and at the same time, transforming. I hate to sound like a motivational speaker, I'm weirding myself out here. But it's transforming acts of hatred, acts of confusion, acts of disrespect, acts of unbridled pain into some meaningful matter that we can then consider in a contemporary context and use in all sorts of different ways. It's manna then to offer restitution to the past, the 32 victims of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire who were denied respect and dignity in their lifetime. In their deaths, actually, many of the Up Stairs Lounge victims did not receive religious burials, say.

Or it can be used as a statement to say how far we've come. To talk about this now means that we are a society that can talk about these difficult queer topics as opposed to the society in the past in the 1970s that couldn't talk about it.

Or it's a statement of never again. What happened there? The conditions that created the Up Stairs Lounge Fire, the fire itself, the fallout, never again. It can mean all sorts of things. It's an active back and forth, isn't it, to remember. In what we choose to remember, and then what we choose to remember in a public way.

Catherine Cooper: How has memory or storytelling around the fire changed since the event, both within the local community in New Orleans and outside of it? Because it did have that national feature to it as well.

Bobby Fieseler: In its day in the '70s, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire when it occurred, it was this literally explosive event that involved fire bursting out of the windows of this second story gay bar that was positioned like a castle keep where people who passed by it every day didn't even know there was a massive gay bar up there. And they were forced to all stare and reckon with this calamity and this violence and people literally burning before their eyes.

That drew a lot of attention in its span and in its time period. There were a few days of national coverage of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire because national media was suddenly interested in this. It was like a true-crime story, this high scope of death. 32 people dead, we have to devote coverage to it. The LA Times makes it a front page story. The Chicago Tribune makes it a front page story. The national TV news covers the Up Stairs Lounge fire. Then it became understood the type of bar that had burned and the character of the individuals, the qualities of the individuals, who had died within it. Then national media suddenly understood that this wasn't a typical true-crime story where the victims would be allotted all the ordinary sympathies.

In the '70s though, queer folk were considered to be of a criminal class. State laws and also local ordinances meant to clamp down upon what was considered a very dangerous subpopulation in the United States. So the idea that attention had been paid to this freaked the media out, freaked authorities out, and they diverted very quickly. It's what happens when anyone gets awkward, they scattered. Even though national media scattered, there was a persistent group of local and national queer journalists that tried to continue the story for about a week. They kept at it. There were activists that kept at it, and then those activists formed what was called the National New Orleans Emergency Task Force. They created an emergency fund and all sorts of things like that. They kept at it for a few months, and then that all faltered. Then there was local silence.

There had been an older institution that had regulated queer life called Euphemistic Living, or The Closet, or The Gay Underworld, or Open Secret, The Social Compact, however you want to reference it, and that clamped back and the Up Stairs Lounge was then foisted locally as this example of what happens when you out yourself. What are the dangers of outness, it's violence. It's you being subjected to dangerous living and a miserable death, that sort of thing. The Up Stairs Lounge was then utilized as this cautionary tale by semi-closeted New Orleanians, people from Louisiana, that would say, "This is an example of why we shouldn't be out, open, using our real names, showing our faces, fighting for our rights. And we certainly shouldn't be involved in politics saying that we're homosexuals."

That was the majority voice, but then there was a minority voice locally of activists that were activated. They were like the slow burning embers stoked by the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy who kept chatting about it, and they would do so for years. They became some of the most important gay New Orleans and lesbian New Orleans activists. Then they, in turn, became some of the most important gay activists in Louisiana.

A classic example of someone who was inspired to activism by the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy was the lesbian bar owner in New Orleans, Charlene Schneider, who operated the lesbian bar Charlene's. In her outrage over the way that the Up Stairs Lounge victims were treated in death, she became convinced the myth of live and let live in New Orleans, the idea that I can do my dirty thing in my corner and you can do your dirty thing in your corner and we're not going to get punished for it, the idea that that was a ruse because gays were consistently still being targeted within that atmosphere, incensed Charlene, and motivated her to open up ... It was a radical act. She, in 1977, opened up a bar for gay women and used her real name, and that was directly connected to her experience with the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy.

Then, there was this long battle, I could talk about this forever, decades where New Orleans fought itself about whether or not it was even okay to talk about the fire. There were parties for and against, and people like Charlene were saying, "We needed to talk about this and we need to connect it to a legacy of political action." People like the former Up Stairs Lounge bar owner, Phil Esteve, would say, "No, New Orleans Live and Let Live is the way that makes things safe. There's no gay activists in New Orleans because none are needed."

That was ongoing up until the first scholarship of the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy, which happens in the late '80s, and early '90s. There are local writers then and journalists that try to revisit the story. Then that continues into the 21st century where there is a tremendous explosion of scholarship and interest and discussion, first locally, then nationally, then internationally of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. Where now it's not just debated whether we should talk about this event or connect it to a legacy of queer rights or queer wellbeing, et cetera, but it's the subject of musicals that are touring internationally. That there was an U p Stairs Lounge musical called The View Upstairs that recently played in Tokyo, translated into Japanese. These are folks in Tokyo, in Japanese, singing about something that happened to closeted gay folk in the 1970s French Quarter. It's insane when you think about it.

There are German feature story writers right now that are writing stories about the 50th anniversary of the Up Stairs Lounge and thinking about what does this mean for the legacy of international queer folk. That's a tremendous growth. The seed of activism and interest was like, I hate to use the biblical mustard seed allusion, but I am a gay Roman Catholic, so it's like it grew into the largest tree where there has never been more discussion. That sort of exponential growth will continue to happen with the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. But first, in a natural storytelling city like New Orleans, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire for a long span of time was the one story that was off limits. No more.

Catherine Cooper: We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the fire: June 24, 2023. Does the Queer, LGBTQ community have any plans to mark the event in New Orleans?

Bobby Fieseler: Yeah. There's a tremendous amount of public programming internationally and locally that's going to happen. I'm a board member of a local organization called the LGBT Archives Project of Louisiana, and we have a planning committee that's putting on a conference symposium for three days in New Orleans to be held at the Marriott Hotel, which is across the street from the historic site of the Up Stairs Lounge Bar.

We're going to host three days of discussion, of meetings and of tribute where there's going to be all of the authors who've written books on the Up Stairs Lounge, we're all going to get together and have a confab. All the people who've done artistic interpretations, people who've made musicals, created dance pieces, written screenplays, they're going to all get together and talk about things. Academics, religious folk, who've preached, elegized in some way the victims of the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy, their input and their impact. It's going to be an extensive thing.

It's June 23rd through June 25th. Then, of course, June 24th is the actual 50th anniversary of the tragedy. On that afternoon, there's going to be a very meaningful service at the historic St. Mark's Church, which is the church that on July 1, 1973, held the first Up Stairs Lounge memorial in the French Quarter. Then there's going to be a second line that leads us to the Up Stairs Lounge historical site, where there's going to be a small ceremony at the plaque where the Up Stairs Lounge existed, where the Up Stairs Lounge fell on the map, and there there's going to be a meaningful service.

There's going to be a combination of conversation, tribute, et cetera, to recognize this important event, to educate the public, to offer respect to the victims. Also to try to, as much as we can, continue to tell the victim's stories. The victims of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire were not just significant because of the way they happened to die, a lot of these individuals led fascinating lives. Each of them, you could make 32 movies out of each and every one of the individuals who perished at the Up Stairs Lounge. So fascinating was that the way that these were individuals who moved between worlds, who figured out how to live in very difficult circumstances. All of them had a unique way of coming to the Up Stairs Lounge that night, that bar that they considered their safe haven.

Catherine Cooper: If people want to get involved-

Bobby Fieseler: I would go to the LGBT Archives Project website, and you can find more information there. There's an Eventbrite page and all sorts of stuff like that.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Bobby.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Bobby Fieseler about writing "Tinderbox" and the importance of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire in LGBT activism as we come up to the 50th anniversary of the fire.

May 9, 2023

128. Sharing the Memoir of a Japanese Draft Resister of Conscience during WWII

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gail Kuromiya: I'm Gail Kuromiya. I'm the third-oldest daughter of Yosh Kuromiya, who is the author of the book that we'll be discussing.

Art Hansen: And I'm Art Hansen, and I'm the editor of the book that we'll be discussing. I'm a retired professor in History and Asian American Studies at California State University at Fullerton.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today. Could you talk about why it was so important to have Mr. Kuromiya's memoir, Beyond the Betrayal, published and made available to the greater public?

Gail Kuromiya: Well, if you look in the appendix of the book, you'll see that dad made a lot of appearances at conferences, universities, high schools, and whatnot, sharing his history of being a draft resister during World War II. He really wanted to get the story out to people who are interested, in particular, Japanese Americans and the younger generation. And he was actually hoping that that generation would spread the news. He felt the Japanese American community itself needed to clean its own house first and to acknowledge what happened during the war because it wasn't often shared from generation to generation. Thankfully, that's changing now, but he wanted to acknowledge what happened and learn from it and understand our own responsibilities for what happened.

Art Hansen: And from my perspective, I think Yosh Kuromiya's memoir is exceedingly important because although there were 300 plus draft resisters from the War Relocation Authority concentration camps during World War II, this is the only book-length memoir. There have been articles written, including ones by Yosh himself, but this is the only book length one. And most of the resisters have passed away. So, this was something that was exceedingly important. It was important to me too, because since 1972 when I started studying the Japanese American World War II experience, I have focused my attention on resistance activities by the Japanese Americans themselves. Not people who did things for the Japanese Americans, ministerial people and the like, but actually the Japanese Americans themselves. They had been depicted as being passive and not taking control of the situation and not defending their civil rights and their human dignity. In fact, I have found out that they did. And so, I wanted to showcase those kinds of stories. I think this is a very important story that is emblematic of this whole idea of victim self-representation of the wartime experience.

Gail Kuromiya: I was the one who was probably most interested in dad's work all along from the time he got involved in the early nineties, actually. He would send me printed copies of the talks he gave. But as a daughter, it was a juggling act. Some of the challenges were just dealing with internal family dynamics. Dad himself was pretty darn stubborn. And in some ways, he was his own worst enemy because obviously as a resister he had really strong beliefs and opinions. And as a daughter, that balance of power was a little different. A lot of good came out of that as well. My sisters and I all live far apart, so that was a bit of a challenge. And this was all when we were working on the first family version. Communication was pretty constant. That was one of the good things that came out of it. But that was also sometimes a challenge.

Art Hansen: In my case, to give it some context, I met Yosh Kuromiya in 1995 at a conference that was held in Powell, Wyoming, and focused upon the topic of remembering Heart Mountain. And it was a big conference and everything. And I met him standing in line waiting for some lunch together. And I was immediately struck by what a remarkable person he was. And we just really hit it off and we had some very good common ground. And then years later when Yosh wrote his first draft of his memoir, he picked three people to read it and to provide some commentary on it, and I was one of the three. And I told him that I thought he should consider getting it published by a university press. And I mentioned two presses. One, the University of Washington Press. And the other, the University Press of Colorado. And the reason was because both of those presses dealt with a hybrid audience. Not just academics, but also a general audience as well.

And I thought this was a story that needed to get beyond academia and out to the larger public. Yosh Kuromiya was able to tell a very powerful one. And then I didn't hear much about it again until years later when I was contacted by Lawson Inada, who has written the poetic forward and the poetic afterward to the book as it's published by the University Press of Colorado. And he said, "Art, I have been working with the Kuromiya daughters on a family history that Yosh has produced. And I would like maybe to have you help in some way." And I think he was suggesting that I might write an introduction or something for this family book. And so, I got a copy of the family book and it was very good. And as I read it and everything, I said, "This book needs to be out in public, and it needs to be something that a lot of people can read. No matter if they live in the United States or wherever they live, they need to read this book."

Then I decided I would like to be able to edit this manuscript, but there were a couple of problems. One, apparently Yosh had proceeded with submitting his memoir for publication consideration by the University of Washington Press. And the University of Washington Press had turned it down. One of the so-called anonymous peer reviewers of it remained anonymous, but the other one became known to me. And it was somebody that was very important to studying the draft resistance, which was Eric Muller, a professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. And Eric Muller wrote a book called Free to Die for Their Country, and it was all about the Japanese American draft resisters during World War II. And so, I decided that I would like to see the evaluation that Eric Muller wrote of the book. So the Kuromiya family, Gail in particular, sent it to me.

And when I read it, I could see why Eric was positive about the book, but at the same time, he had reservations. And he had 14 different points that he raised about factual mistakes that Yosh had inadvertently made. And so I felt that one of the things I had to do was to provide a firewall to these errors that he had made. In my endnotes, I was able to hitchhike off of Eric Muller's critique that he did for the University of Washington Press and plug in his comments and his objections to what Yosh had said. So that was one of the big challenges.

And the second big challenge was that Yosh Kuromiya was very infatuated with a book that came out by Robert Stinnett, and the title of the book was Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. And this was a book that was very controversial. In a sense, it said that Roosevelt knew when other people didn't that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. And he let it be open to attack because this provided a back door for the United States getting into war against the Nazis in Germany and against the fascists in Italy. That was the premise of the book. Yosh believed that this was the case. And so, when editing it, I had to go through many, many book reviews of that book by diplomatic historians and get a sense of their critical opinion. And I was able to show in the two-pages long endnote that there were book reviewers, for instance, that supported what Yosh supported about this conspiracy of Roosevelt's and the dastardly act of Roosevelt. And then there were many other reviewers of it that felt that he had not proved his thesis, that he had a warm barrel, but not really a smoking gun.

The other challenge I had was that a good friend of mine and a superb historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Diane Fujino, who had put a lot of time into putting forth the manuscript that was submitted to the University of Washington Press. And so, I didn't want to proceed with this project unless I had Diane Fujino's blessing. And she is one of the most gracious and nicest women. And she willingly said, "Art, go ahead with it." Diane Fujino was willing to take it to a second university press, but Yosh was not. He said, "I'm old. And at this particular point, all I want to do is to get this book out. And I'll get it out as a family book." Anyway, those were the main challenges that I had as an editor. Otherwise, there wasn't much of a challenge at all. It was a great opportunity and I was working with great people.

Gail Kuromiya: There's a lot of other people he didn't name that were really important to him, but primarily it was Lawson Inada, who Art mentioned, retired professor and former poet laureate from Oregon State. He's the one who connected Art with the family. Martha Nakagawa is a journalist in Los Angeles and close friend of both my dad and my stepmother. Art, of course. Without him, this book would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere in the family version format. And of course, he acknowledged his daughters. My oldest sister, Suzi, is a retired professional graphic designer. She did the original layout for the family version, which was retained for the final version. My next oldest sister, Sharon, from New York, was dad's editor from the very beginning when he first started sending us files. And in the final version when we were working with the University Press of Colorado, Sharon was the one who tracked down all the images that we had used in the family version to verify that we had permission and copyrights and all that kind of stuff.

And although all of us are graphic designers, all of dad's four daughters, we weren't very familiar with the whole final publishing process. Design and layout are two things, but all that technical stuff is beyond us. And then my youngest sister, Miya, she's the only one of us who's still working. So, her involvement was minimal in the beginning, but she provided a lot of emotional support for all of us. And then dad acknowledged his second wife, Irene, who was not only his wife, but his personal assistant, his typist, secretary, driver, groomer, all those things. And I would add a lot of other people. My mother, Haru, was family cheerleader and supporter and all-around good sport, my husband Paul, for being so patient since this became my retirement job, essentially. And many other people.

Art Hansen: In most cases, the things that have come out on Japanese Americans have not put a premium upon the resistance of Japanese Americans themselves to their unjust incarceration during World War II. And their pauperization, really, as well as anything else. The loss of property, but also the loss of personal dignity and civil rights in the sense of being an American. I think that this adds to the array of other books that have come out that have focused on this resistance by Japanese Americans themselves. But the main narrative before was essentially that Japanese Americans were so desperate to be able to affirm their American citizenship that they would do anything that was necessary. Their attitude was, this is our government, right or wrong. And therefore, many of them gladly decided that when they had the opportunity to be able to be drafted into the military, they said yes.

And then they became part of the great 442nd Battalion and it is one of the most decorated units ever in American military history. And I think that's what the American public wanted to hear, the fact that no matter what you do to people, America's so important that you would never hold it for account. And I think what the Japanese American draft resisters did and what Yosh does in his book is to hold not only the United States government to account right up through the President of the United States, but also to hold into account the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League, because they were corroborators with the US government in the incarceration of their own population. I think to have somebody like Yosh Kuromiya, they would like to look at him as being unpatriotic when in fact his whole act of draft resistance was patriotic. He believed in the Constitution of the United States, and we need to live up to that. And that's what he tried to do along with the other draft resisters of conscience is to make the United States live up to that. So draft resistance was exceedingly important.

Gail Kuromiya: The overall interaction I had with my father through this whole process, actually, he had been writing all through the years of his public speaking. And he told me that he had always intended on consolidating those writings into some kind of format. But I asked him at one point when my two boys were young to document all of these stories and these experiences that he had gone through for his kids, grandkids, and future generations. And a lot of his friends and colleagues encouraged him as well with his writings and his appearances. So, dad came up with this idea to make it a cooperative family project, which I don't believe we've ever done before in our family, but we all had our own families and we were living in different parts of the country. And his hope was that it would increase and improve our communication, which it did for me.

And so, in 2010, he sent me his first chapter out of the book. And one thing I do want to mention is that once he had his manuscript where he was comfortable with it, and we had done the family version, he was adamant that nothing be changed from his original manuscript through all of the publishing process. And other than grammatical errors and things like that, Art, to his credit, maintained that. The final book that people will read are dad's words. So, from 2010 until dad died in 2018, constant phone calls with dad, conversations that I probably never would've had the opportunity to have with him because it went beyond his experiences during the war as a resister and all the stuff surrounding that before they went into the camps, afterwards, my childhood, that type of thing. And of course, not all of that is in the book because it's not a tell-all book. But it was really valuable and it got harder and harder because dad started losing his hearing, and that made it really difficult. He didn't use the computer, so I have all his long hand-written notes. I took notes when I talked to him on the phone, which I'm kind of going through now and coming up with these little pearls of stories that I would not have known had I not been having this ongoing conversation with him. So that was the primary memory of this whole process. And even though the book itself is quite an accomplishment, I still think that the phone calls are what I will cherish the most out of this experience, because a lot of Nisei dads are not typically very talkative about their personal feelings and emotions. But I think, through this process, dad got more and more comfortable sharing that type of stuff. So that was a real positive that came out of it.

Art Hansen: In my case, I just have one story that I'd like to relate. It has to do with Yosh's widow, Irene Kuromiya. And when this edited version of the manuscript was being considered to be published by the University Press of Colorado, Irene had registered a protest. And it came to me and it hurt me a lot because I regarded and still regard Irene as a very close and dear friend of mine. She said, "Art Hansen, he was sent the manuscript by Yosh years ago, and he didn't even read it. He didn't even say anything about it," which was absolutely untrue. Not only did I read it, I wrote about a seven or eight-page critique of it, including even a copyediting section to it. And somebody reminded her of that fact. And I think she somehow rather had blanked on it.

What she was upset about more than anything is she felt that what Yosh wanted really was not a published book, but just the family edition for family and friends. That's all he wanted. And I had to, in a sense, go against that, by talking to Gail in particular, to find out at bottom what Yosh wanted. He might have said, "I want just the family edition," but he really wanted something that would get out to a much larger group so that this important story of not just himself, but the story of himself in relationship to the draft resistance movement would become public knowledge. And then almost to the end, Irene still wanted just the family book. But she came to the book event that we had at the Japanese American National Museum. And I think she was very gracious at that event. And you could tell that she was bubbling over with pride. She loved her husband so much and was so proud of his memoir and her own involvement in it. But I think all of the other stuff was washed away.

Gail Kuromiya: Dad wanted to present his manuscript as a personal account. He didn't want it to be an academic document. And he did want to get it out to the public. But at the same time, I think he had a mistrust of the commercial printing process. But one of the themes that he was trying to get across in the memoir, and we talked about this before he passed, was the role of the Issei, his parents’ generation who immigrated here from Japan. So, he attributes a lot of his decisions as being influenced by my grandfather and the morals and integrity he had.

But overall, I think the takeaway from the book is included in Cherstin Lyons' condensed review on the back of the hardcover version. And I believe it's a quote out of dad's text. It reads, "What is a citizen's rightful response to constitutional transgressions? What indeed is a citizen's responsibility when racially-based civil rights restrictions are imposed by an errant government?" I think that sums up the gist of it, even though Dad always told me that he didn't intend this to be a portrayal of him as a resister. Because he said even though that was a pivotal decision in his life, it wasn't his entire life. And that's why he insisted on including all of the rest of his life in the book as well.

Art Hansen: I think that the major takeaway of Yosh's book has been expressed nicely by Gail in that quote that she read. Actually, another important thing that I'd like readers of Beyond the Betrayal to take away is Yosh's entire life, not just his time in camp or in prison, et cetera, or fighting for the rights of the resisters against the JACL and others after the war. But really to see that his entire life is a tribute to not just his acts, but to the man himself and the character, the deep and abiding character of that particular person.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much. This was wonderful.

Gail Kuromiya: Thank you.

Art Hansen: Thank you so much, Catherine.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Gail Kuromiya and Art Hansen about the importance of Yosh Kuromiya's memoir and sharing it broadly through publication.

April 25, 2023

127. The Past and Future of UNESCO World Heritage After 50 Years

Transcript

Sadie Schoeffler: Okay. So this Sadie Schoeffler, and I'm here with--

Lynn Meskell: With Lynn Meskell. I'm a PIK professor, which is Penn Integrates Knowledge professor at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations in a School of Design here, Historic Preservation, Penn Museum, and in anthropology.

Sadie Schoeffler: Wonderful. Okay, so we're here talking with you today about your publication, A Future In Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. And it's a great time to be talking about this book because a lot of conversations right now are centered around world heritage, with the 50 year anniversary of the World Heritage Convention coming up. So Lynn, could you tell us a little bit about your publication, A Future in Ruins?

Lynn Meskell: The book started really because I was fascinated as an archeologist that world heritage sites, I'd worked at a few myself, were seemingly so important, and yet as archeologists we knew so little about UNESCO and its processes. How it works, the politics is behind it, and so on. So that's why I embarked on that ethnography. And in fact, I'm still working on UNESCO a decade or more later. It's one of those things you can't really get away from. And in a world of conflict and human rights violations, UNESCO is still central to those debates.

Yeah, I think what the drafters of that convention would say, one of the most significant things is that they put natural and cultural heritage together in one document. And so the conservation itself wasn't simply monuments, but also landscapes. And I think as we approach serious issues around climate change, for example, and environmental justice, that was actually very farsighted.

Sadie Schoeffler: So you see the future of UNESCO focusing more on topics such as climate change and environmental justice that come up now when we're focusing on sites that are already on the World Heritage List, and maybe future sites?

Lynn Meskell: I think climate change is very, very important, and we're going to see that debated pretty hotly with the Great Barrier Reef coming up this year being discussed as being potentially put on the World Heritage List in danger. But given the capacity of UNESCO, which is severely limited, particularly after the US withdrew its funding from the organization, there's not a lot that UNESCO can really do. It is a standard-setting agency. It does look after the World Heritage List and inscriptions, and I think we're just going to see more of the same.

It has really grappled with conflict, perhaps not as effectively as other agencies. And I think its resources, its personnel, its funding is severely depleted. So the glory days in some ways are kind of behind, like the Nubian campaign or Angkor. And now it just faces this raft of challenges, whether it's conflict or climate change, Indigenous rights, things that it's really not particularly well set up to do, wasn't designed to do, and has not mobilized very effectively. Hasn't even harmonized very effectively with other UN agencies.

Sadie Schoeffler: So now we're talking a little bit about the challenges that world heritage is facing, has faced, and continues to face, and how those challenges are evolving. Do you think that the processes for addressing these challenges are going to be something that'll be brought up at the coming up convention? And how do you think professionals like yourself are incorporating the legacies of UNESCO's convention into your own work?

Lynn Meskell: So to answer the first part of that question, given the structure of UNESCO, this is the United Nations. So the nations are the most powerful decision makers. And as you might imagine, they are not very amenable to critique. So anything that would change the convention, that would add additional oversight or scrutiny is going to be vetoed by the member states. So think of the power of the UN Security Council. It's that sort of mechanism.

And so the committee, which is made up of 21 nation states, are the most powerful players in the room, and they're the ones that are going to decide whether to put a site on the list in danger, whether to adhere to human rights policies, and so on. And states are very reluctant to do that. What they really want to do is inscribe more and more sites on the list so that they can garner this social and economic prestige of doing that within their own territory.

In terms of the second part of your question, what can academics and practitioners really do? I think it falls to us to work in the interstices, really. To work on issues like human rights or conflict. To do the things that UNESCO really can't do. So we have this incredible list that draws attention to sites, but in fact UNESCO is not a research agency and they don't really read our work for the most part. So we have to just go on independently and hope that some of our findings can be useful.

But we do additional work. UNESCO always wanted Civil Society to be involved, and it is very keen on academic networks. So I think it's really up to us to just carry on and do the best work that we can and realize that they can't do everything, and they certainly don't have the funds or personnel to do that. And I think that's a popular misconception about the power of UNESCO, particularly in the United States.

I have two fairly new projects since I came to the University of Pennsylvania. One is with the Arab Barometer, which looks at public opinion. And in fact it's the first large scale public opinion around cultural heritage for Iraq and Syria. And it's based in Mosul and Aleppo. And that's garnering interviews, long-standing interviews with 1,600 participants in each city about how they feel about the destruction of sites, the reconstruction, who should be involved, responsible, who should fund it, what are their priorities for heritage reconstruction. A lot of very emotional responses, too, about what they prioritized and what they felt most upset about during those sort of conflicts.

And so that's been very telling. You may not be surprised that heritage and its reconstruction comes quite low in priorities compared to other humanitarian concerns like health, security, stability, employment, education and so on. And that's a wake-up call for those of us who think that heritage is all about world peace and brings repair. That it's not enough to reconstruct a museum or an archeological site that we're interested in. We have to think about what people on the ground actually want and to try and make heritage much more about socioeconomic benefits and social goods as it were, and perhaps link more with other UN partners, in International Committee for the Red Cross, other sorts of things if we actually want to do something meaningful.

And the second project is with my colleagues at Wharton Business School here at Penn, looking at the 1,154 world heritage sites around the world and how they are positioned in terms of cooperation and conflict. And unfortunately what we're finding is that evermore increasingly the nomination of world heritage properties leads to increased conflict. And that's around everything from working with NGOs to the environment to the presence of rebels to bad labor practices and so on.

And that's a study that's done on every world heritage site and is a AI data scrape that includes 80 languages and sentiment analysis. And that's actually a pretty depressing set of results that show that world heritage has become less about cooperation and peace-building and benefits and more about the scramble for economic advantage, for exclusion, for moving people out, alienation, and so on. So it doesn't actually necessarily bring sustainable development and all the promises that are made by so many agencies. And also archeologists think that we're doing great things, but in fact we may be exacerbating tension.

Certainly, my colleagues in historic preservation here at Penn work very effectively with communities. And I have colleagues that have worked in the southwest, in the Middle East, and also in countries like Rwanda. And I think they're very impressive. In fact, if anything, I think maybe archeology could learn something from that historic preservation perspective. Archeologists, and particularly American archeologists, have traditionally thought, "Past subjects are dead, so we don't need to really worry." But in fact, a preservation angle is much more community-driven in living communities.

And that's what we're getting also clearly from our more global research as well, that this is not something that's anchored entirely in the past. This is absolutely a living heritage that matters to people. So I think there needs to be more interdisciplinary crossover too. And most of my work has been with people in other fields, including political scientists and economists and international lawyers. And the sort of work that heritage is so complex now that you do have to work across disciplines. That you can't do it otherwise. We need to understand how all this is playing out. And the last thing I'd say is that heritage is increasingly being used in the security sphere.

So there's the nexus around cultural property protection and the military. And we see that playing out in Ukraine most recently, but it has also been the case across the Middle East. And we've seen that also in Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Afghanistan. Plenty of other places as well. So our materials are being taken up and considered and given some priority, and we're not part of that conversation. So I think we need to learn how others use our material or see its value or see it as a liability, and so on. So that heritage security nexus is I think our next big challenge, and it's already here.

I have another project that looks at not just world heritage, but other sorts of heritage sites in India. And I should say that, whilst UNESCO wants to privilege, obviously, the 1972 list, and the media take up on that, and that, in the popular realm, is obviously the thing that people think of when they refer to cultural heritage. They think of the pyramids or the Acropolis, or the Taj Mahal, and so on. But there are of course so many other thousands of sites.

So I'm interested in what's happening in India, particularly around heritage and conflict. India doesn't have to be a war zone to actually have conflicts or social conflicts, or those around gender, caste, and class. And so I think that's a whole other project in a country that has some 4,000 official sites on a register, and then 10,000 unofficial, and then many other thousands that are not necessarily reported. There's nothing like India for the scale of monuments and heritage. And so I think we need to diversify also and look at how other people are doing these sorts of preservation projects. Other countries, other sorts of living heritage, and so on.

Sadie Schoeffler: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing with everyone your perspectives and experiences.

Lynn Meskell: Thank you very much.

Sadie S. Whitehurst speaks with Lynn Meskell about the past and future of UNESCO and World Heritage Site designations.

April 11, 2023

126. Exploring Non-Destructive Analysis of Ceramics

Transcript

Sadie: My name is Sadie Schoeffler.

Chandra: I'm Chandra Reedy from the University of Delaware, and I'm director of the Center for Historic Architecture and Design, which is a research center within the Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. And I also run our laboratory for analysis of cultural materials.

Sadie: Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with us today. I understand you just received a grant award from NCPTT to do some research on non-destructive microanalysis of ceramics. If you want to tell us a little bit about this project and how this project started?

Chandra: I'm really excited about this project. It's using a relatively new instrument that's currently being used mainly in industry, and as far as I know, it's only been used with one or two cultural material projects and those were with paintings, so I think it will be very useful for ceramics as well. And it's called Mirage OPTIR microscopy, and that stands for an infrared and Raman microscope with optical photothermal spectroscopy. And basically, what it does is it allows analysis of very tiny slots, less than a micron in spatial resolution, with no surface preparation or sampling needed and there's no surface contact. And you can get analyses of both crystalline and amorphous or glassy phases. It directs a laser onto a surface and that causes a photothermal effect when the sample absorbs infrared radiation, and it's reflected back with a spectra that's called an OPTIR Spectra that's collected using a photon probe.

And what's important is that this OPTIR Spectra is a really good match for FTIR Spectra, and that FTIR is a very long-standing analytical technique and so there are a lot of databases already available that allow you to identify what material you have. And the photon probe also acts as a Raman excitation source so you can get simultaneous Raman analysis, which means you have a lot of data to help you pin down what material you have. And again, with Raman spectroscopy, there's already large databases available so you can compare your spectra to those. Why this technology could be a game changer

But with this technique, we can get less than 0.45 nanometers spot size, compared to FTIR, which is about 10 microns spot size. So we can get very, very tiny spots and that means when there are little crystals in glazes and slips and paints, we can identify what those are, and that tells us a lot about the technological processes that were used in the past to produce these materials. And we can also identify clay minerals and particles in the ceramic, so that tells us about geological sources or materials. And then we can also analyze spots on accretions that develop during burial, and that will allow someone to tailor a conservation treatment to specifically the mix of materials they have there.

I guess I got interested in this because I was already working in a shared analytical facility that our university has where there's a lot of instruments, and that's very helpful for small labs like mine. We don't get multimillion dollar grants in our field so I can't afford most of these instruments or technicians to keep them maintained and all that. So I was working in there on another project and they got this new instrument recently, and so they held a workshop to show what it can do and I attended that. And it looked like a lot of potential applications to ceramics so I decided to give it a try and this grant allows me to experiment with it.

If you're working in an art museum, you have intact ceramic vessels, and so you're not going to take a sample from that. It's not advised. I think in the past, people drilled little samples from the bottom, but nobody would do that today. So in a museum then, they're looking at the entire large object. And there are techniques you can do such as X radiography to look at manufacturing method, and there are some surface analysis techniques like the FTIR and Raman that I've just spoken about. There are some that can be done without sampling to try to identify decorative areas, the materials that were used there.

In archeology, it's a little bit different because we have sherds, and if you've been at an archeological site where there are ceramics, you have a lot of sherds, bags and bags and bags full of sherds. So one might think, well, who cares if it's destructive or not? But actually, it's very helpful to be able to analyze a sherd non-destructively so you still have it intact at the end of your analyses, and then you can use it for other methods of analyses and that can be very helpful to do multiple methods on the exact same piece so you know that your results, if they vary, it's not because you have different materials. And so this could be very useful because we could get a lot of information and then we still have the object at the end. And if somebody wants to come and replicate your analysis later, they can on the exact same piece, or if new methods of analysis become available, you can use the exact same piece.

If you want to take a slice off that piece for thin section analysis, which many archeologists do, then you can analyze it first and then you can compare your thin section with the original analyses. And if you don't cover your thin section, if you just polish the surface, you can use that for microscopy and then you can use the same technique to analyze all of the tiny little crystals in the glaze and analyze specific spot or to do phase analyses of the entire thin section. So there's a lot of advantages to non-destructive analyses, even with archeological sherds. The goal of the project

My hypothesis is that I will be able to characterize very tiny phases in glazes, which is extremely important for being able to determine what the original recipes were that the potters used and what their firing regimes were. You can reconstruct that if you understand the different crystals and glassy phases in the glaze. You can also develop an idea about what the potters were trying to achieve aesthetically, if you can analyze the materials, and how they were going about doing that. And I also think we'll be able to analyze sherd surfaces that have undergone deterioration in burial so we can understand the extent of that deterioration and characterize burial accretions that might need to be removed by conservators.

So I think based on how this technique has worked for other fields and other kinds of materials, I think it should work for this and I will find out soon, but I'm pretty sure that it will.

My real goal is to be able to better understand the knowledge and experimentation history and technological achievement of past craftspeople to see and better appreciate how they learned to control their materials and their production processes to make objects that met specific functions with better and better performance. And I think that understanding that past technological history might help us in understanding today's technological challenges and how to overcome them. And so I think this project might be a major breakthrough because it's going to allow us to do things that I haven't been able to do before in terms of fast analysis with no preparation and identifying nanometer size phases and materials, so that will give a lot of clues about these past technological processes that were developed.

And also, I think it will help us to better understand deterioration. Another goal of mine is to be able to better preserve these past materials for the future, and so understanding what deterioration they've already undergone in burial and how they might better be preventively preserved or treated in conservation approaches will help keep those objects into the future so that others can use them for analysis when new techniques become available to them.

Sadie: Well, I'm excited about what this means for the future of conservation and laboratory analysis and archeological assemblages, and what this is going to do for the archeological record. And I want to say thank you so much for talking with me today about your project, and I'm just really excited.

Chandra: Thank you for talking with me, and I hope to be able to report some positive results a little later on.

NCPTT's Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Chandra Reedy about her project to test the applications of Mirage OPTIR microscopy to non-destructive analysis of ceramics.

March 28, 2023

125. Interpreting History with the Slave Dwelling Project

Transcript

J. Church: Good morning, Joe!

J. McGill: Good morning, how are you?

J. Church: Very well, how are you doing?

J. McGill: I’m well.

J. Church: Be brief if you want but how you got started in this project.

J. McGill: The stars aligned, a lot of things came together at that time, ten years ago when I started the project. At the time, I worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and I would visit places associated with the Trust and on my own. Sometimes these are antebellum sites, you know, prior to the Civil War that could tell many stories. But usually the stories that were told at these sites were of the architecturally significant buildings on those sites and missing from that element of the story were the buildings where enslaved people occupied, where enslaved people did the cooking, where they functioned in the carriage houses, none of that was there. No element of people whom I derived my DNA from, was there.

I was also at that time a Civil War reenactor; I was at least fifteen years into being a Civil War reenactor. So, I know the joys of visiting historic places and sometimes sleeping at those places. And then of course, having that DNA that I have and knowing that something needed to be done with the lack of information out there and making that statement that somebody needs to do something about this. Of course, that somebody was me.

I took it upon myself, I got lucky. I was part of a team to monitor the work of the carpenters that were actually restoring the slave cabins at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, where I am now employed on a full-time basis actually. So, in doing this and seeing the opportunity for these cabins to now tell that element of the story at that place, I wanted to take it a step further and sought permission to spend the night in one of the cabins when they were finished. Well, they thought it was a great idea and then I said well if they think it’s a good idea, maybe others will too.

So, I sought a list from the state Historic Preservation office here in Charlestown, South Carolina, told them my intent. Of course, they got it because they think a lot like I do, it’s about preservation. So, I got the list from them and started making phone calls. And surprisingly, you know after I made my requests and after that awkward calls, of course you know, such a request is not usual, most of them got it. And because most of them got it, I started making a list of where I would go in accordance to those yes’s. Now I got a few noes along the way, but I had enough yeses to step up on faith and make it happen.

My intent was to stay in the state of South Carolina, you know, sleeping in these slave dwellings because that’s where my limited resources would take me, but even with that filling in the list was not a problem. So, I started out on the journey at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. The media was there, they did what the media does and then a few sleepovers later, NPR did a piece on it and there was certainly no turning back then. I had already realized that this was a project much bigger than myself and others saw the value. In fact, a lot saw the potential that I did not see initially because I started getting these calls from other states.

Now luckily for me, at the time, I was employed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and I was traveling to the states of Alabama and Louisiana. Knowing that I was going to these places and putting the word out of this new thing that I was doing, some of my clients or contacts through the National Trust would start seeking these places for me, because they were getting a bonus. See I was traveling there anyway for my job, and I was just tacking one extra day onto that trip, you know just spend the night in these places in these other states. So, again the stars aligned all this came together.

Now, ten years later we’re still at it. I say we because we’re now a non-profit organization functioning as such. We have a lot more checks and balances to ensure that you know what we’re doing is proper and in order. So, again ten years later, I’m at this thing and here we are, you and I Jason about to go into a mutual endeavor.

A lot of folks think like I used ten years ago. A lot of people try to keep slavery on southern plantations. Well, you’ve got to expand that way of thinking. Because if you keep it there, you’re going to miss the urban slavery that happened and you’re going to miss the slavery that happened in those northern states. So, so far, it’s been twenty-five states and the District of Columbia. If you limit it to agriculture, you’re going to keep it at you know, at those larger plantations but you’ve got to also think, you know, even in those northern states there were some plantations. You know, less so than the south, of course, its economy was that agrarian effort to extract from the land all that they could. And that worked better in the south than it did in the north.

Now that northern slavery was more of body servants and people of this nature. You know that structure that usually survives again, near the big house as you just stated, that structure is usually made of better material than the structures for the field hand because it’s by your nice, beautiful big house and it’s about aesthetics, it’s optics. If you have that building near your nice beautiful big house, you want it to look good at least. Not saying that the enslaved people who occupied that space got any better treatment, but at least the materials that that house was made out of was usually more substantial, it certainly looked better, and it was a status symbol.

You know, my first three sleepovers, I was all by myself, all alone and that’s how it started. So, now I’m back to that but not by choice. It’s because of the Coronavirus that we’re back here. But I’ve been at it long enough to embrace the technology that exists and that is one of the reasons you and I are talking right now. I’m seeing your face and you’re seeing mine, you’re likewise. Well, we’ve taken that same technology to apply to the slave dwelling project. I’m sleeping in the places alone, but we also give folks the opportunity to interact with me through Facebook live and before the actual sleepover, we also have a zoom call that folks can take part in. And the zoom call is more real time interactive when we do the Facebook live, you know it’s me talking a lot then I get an opportunity to scroll through the people who are signed in and try to answer any questions that they may have posed to me. Less interactive than zoom, but interactive enough to still let folks get a feel for the place. They see the place through my eyes, they hear about the place through my ears.

You know it’s fun. I’m kind of getting used to this, but you know, it’s good and bad. It’s good because people can do the social distancing and stay where they are and still learn about that place, but it takes away that face to face and eye to eye, that campfire atmosphere where they can have that interaction with everybody around the campfire. So, we want to try to get back to that as soon as the science will allow us to. We plan these things as if I’m going to be there physically and there are going to be others there physically with me, we planned it as such. But we know that at some point, if the science says, “Well you know, that’s not the way to go,” then we are going to have to pull back and make it these social distance learning type activities and we are prepared to do that.

You know in 1787, when we were in our nation’s capital, which was back then, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, considering the ratification of that Constitution, the fact that you know, the southerners demanded that they needed twenty more years to still import people into this nation for the purpose of enslaving them because their economy depended on it. You know it’s the agriculture that we talked about earlier, that was that opportunity right then to snuff out this slavery that exists now in these United States. They could have ended that chattel slavery right then and there. But they did not. They kicked it down the road, kicked it down the road, and they kept doing that and because they kept doing that, and even after freedom came, all those things that replaced slavery like convict labor and KKK and lynchings and white citizen councils and you know, they were always doing these things to disenfranchise the African American population.

You know, take Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the massacre there. Take your Rosewoods and if you look at compile a list, that complied list of people who were lynched, you will see that there were a lot of businessmen who were thriving and because they were thriving and competing with the white population, there were these efforts to silence them and making a public spectacle of what was done to them.

So, I want folks to know that, yeah, we should be angry, but we’re still dealing with what we should have dealt with historically that we allowed to persist, the slavery and the effects thereof and we are still living with that legacy. But yet they’ll make a statement like, yeah, get over it. You know it happened, not in their lifetime so get over it. They got to understand what that is. That “it” is more than slavery. That “it” is all that period you just described. Disenfranchisement are when these African Americans were pursuing their happiness there was always something, a law or a group, or something to take it all away again, take you right back to zero.

So those things continue to persist, and we say that if you know, if were going to learn history or you’re doomed to repeat it or something to that effect. I know I butchered that, but the thing is we know the history, but we still repeat it. I was given a tour yesterday at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens and my question and answer period now tend to focus more on connecting those dots, what we’re going on today, you know George Floyd’s death, what we’re dealing with now, monuments coming down at an alarming rate and they’re not just confederate monuments anymore. I mean they try to, throw everything, everything into that bucket.

Well, it is because that we’ve been telling a distorted history for so long. Some of these public sites, you know they kind of fit into to it. They kind of went along with it, whereas they should have been just doing the opposite. I think had they been telling the real history, I think we would be in a much better place because if you ask a group of people if they’ve visited a plantation, many of them may say no. But then if you ask that question another way, you know if you ask them if they visited Montpelier or Mount Vernon or the Highlands or Mount Vernon, they may say yes. Well, those are plantations. And that’s that indication that we were trying to hide this, hide something on these properties. And because we were hiding it, prolonging it for so long, we still have people who come to these sites seeking out that sugar coated version of the history, you know the Gone with The Wind hoop skirt version of that history, but now what they’re finding out is that some of these plantations and some of these historic sites are doing what they’re supposed to do, what they should have been doing all along. And it disappoints some people because again, they still come for that fantasied version of the story. But the number of sites that are doing right and doing it the right way, that number is increasing and those who are still doing that glorified Gone with The Wind version of history, that number is getting smaller. So, we’re making progress.

J. Church: What would you like to tell people that you maybe haven’t gotten across yet?

J. McGill: One thing, I think that if anybody should come away from a plantation thinking that slavery was a good thing, I think they need to seek a refund. If they paid anything for that, to have that story told to them. Working at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens and giving people choices as to which tour that they should take and knowing that there’s a value to each tour. In other words, you pay an additional fee to go on the tour that you want to go on. Well, the tour that we give from slavery to freedom, our cabin tour is taking the least. And that speaks to the bigger problem that we have as Americans, wanting to stay in that comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the atrocities that we committed along the way to obtain this greatness that we are as a nation. But we must understand that in obtaining this greatness, we relegated the natives as less than, we relegated the enslaved Africans as less than and because we label them as such historically, we’re still dealing with the residuals of that today. So, I think people should be open minded enough that you know, the white privileges that are granted that are beneficial to whites. You know it came at the cost of making others less than. I think we should stop resisting. The demographic shift of what’s to come in the near future, you know the white population is not going to be the majority anymore. Of course, now the majority is a good mixture of others because when you fill out forms these days, you see black, white, other. And we’re getting a lot more others and there’s a lot of pushback against that and you can see it you know with the building of walls, or the banning of Muslims or voter suppression. We need to be mindful that resistance to this demographic shift, it tends to divide and conquer. And I don’t think that’s the way that we should go in our pursuit of happiness and forming of a more perfect union.

J. Church: It’s a nice way to wrap it up. Well thanks for talking to us Joe, I really appreciate it.

Jason Church speaks with Joe McGill about the Slave Dwelling Project and the importance of how we interpret and share history.

March 14, 2023

124. Cherie Quarters

Transcript

Jason Church: Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jason Church. I'm the Chief of Technical Services at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. And today, I am here talking to author Ruth Laney, who has just released her book on Cherie Quarters. And I loved the book, Ruth. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm a fan of Ernest Gaines, so I wanted to read it because of that, but you really have three books put together. It's an amazing amount of research, very impressive, but let's start, and how did you get started with Ernest Gaines?

Ruth Laney: I write about it in the book. I had never heard his name, and I was working at LSU Press as a copy editor on the second floor of Hill Memorial Library, which is now not used as the press anymore. The press is in another location now. But at that time, the press was located there and Charles East was I think director at that time, or possibly assistant director. He brought a man upstairs where the copy editing department was, and I believe there were four of us in four different offices. And he kind of wrapped on the door jam and I went to the door, the door was open, I could see. There was Ernest Gaines standing there. He had a couple of books and he had a brown beret in his hands. And Charles introduced, "This is Ernest Gaines. He's in town to help scout locations for making a movie of his novel, The Autobiography of Miss. Jane Pittman. And he will be giving a reading this afternoon at Lockett Hall," which was very close.

"If anybody up here wants to take an hour off and go over and hear him read, you're more than welcome to do so." So, I went and Beverly Jarrett, whose office was across the hall from mine, walked over there. It was a classroom, and Warren Eyster was the creative writing teacher. So, it was a group of his creative writing students and some professors who maybe wandered in and us, and we were all sitting in desks. And then he stood up in the front of the room and he read short story called Just Like A Tree, which is the last story in his short story collection Bloodline. And I remember Warren Eyster saying to his creative writing students, "We've been studying point of view, so I want you to pay special attention to point of view in this story because it's told from multiple points of view."

So, it starts out with they're driving in a wagon, in the mud, in the cold mule drawn wagon, and it's the little boy in front with the dad holding the reins, the mother-in-law who's got her sitting chair in the wagon because she insists on bringing her own chair, and they drive up to Aunt Fe's house. Aunt Fe is an elderly woman who is going to have to leave. It's not called Cherie Quarters in the story, but in my mind that's where it's taking place, and civil rights activities are beginning to happen. And so, it's felt that her life is in danger. They are going to send her up north, they might even mention Chicago, and she will be leaving. And so, they're all gathering together to have kind of one last gathering to more or less say goodbye to Aunt Fe. And so, we go from some funny things about one mule won't pull, he just kind of floats free and easy while the other mule does all the pulling.

And the mother-in-law is complaining and moaning about everything, so there's humor. And then you get to the real crux of the story, which is Aunt Fe, Aunt Fe we're going to miss you. And I think the story's been out long enough for me to reveal that in the end, Aunt Fe finds her own way of not being moved. And then the title, Just Like a Tree is taken from the spiritual, "Just like a tree standing inside the water, I shall not be moved." And so, just like a tree, and there's that wonderful, wonderful section that I use as kind of an introduction to my book, Aunt Clo saying, "When you take down a beautiful old oak tree that's been here all these years, you never get the tap root. You jump down in there and you chop at it, but you never get the tap root. And what you're left with is the hole where the roots were, and then the big hole up in the air where all those lovely branches have been all those years."

And to me that said, preservation, these houses are just as much part of the landscape as these old oak trees that have been here all these years. And that to me is like a cry to arms for preservation, not just the old oak trees, but the houses too. And I think today people are more inclined to look at those houses as valuable. We were a bit ahead of our time in wanting to save them, but that was an inspiration to me. But I didn't actually Cherie Quarters itself until 82. I got an assignment from Louisiana Life Magazine to write an article about Ernest Gaines, and they assigned Philip Gould to take the photographs. So, Philip and I think we drove over together from Baton Rouge, but I'm not sure. He may have driven alone from Lafayette and I drove in from Baton Rouge, and I guess Ernie would've come from Lafayette because he was teaching there.

So, the three of us met and we walked up, it was February, it was a cold gray day, and people were still living there, smoke coming out of the chimneys. People would come out on the porch, and kind of wave. They called him EJ because that's how he was known as he grew up there. And then we got all the way down to the end of the lane, and there was an old man working in his garden, and Ernest Gaines and Aunt Reese. Reese looked over and he's like, "Who is that?" And Ernest Gaines said, "It's EJ." And then he smiles, we walk up and we meet him and we talk to him, and he's got this big old vegetable garden. He's in his eighties, and then he had this little dog with him, that little sweet legged dog missing one leg. So in my notes, I found later Philip Gould had gotten down on his stomach in the gravel, and he was asking Ernest and Reese to walk toward him over and over again.

He asked Reese to walk down his front steps over and over again, and I reminded Philip later, look and see if you can find these photos. I was picturing it being taken from the front, but when I realized it was taken from the side, I'm like this is exactly what all these houses look like. So, seeing it in that way was really special. And even though I was writing about Ernest Gaines and I was reading all of his work, I had never been Cherie Quarters until that time, 10 years later. Then in 1992, Rick Smith at LPB and I decided it's time to do a documentary about Ernest Gaines. Of course, we asked him and he agreed. So, we spent two and a half years working on this documentary and we were able to film some of it in Cherie Quarters. There were still houses there when we made the documentary.

And we even had the church service, which at the time there were really only two ladies who would attend church, Suge and Carrie, who were the last two people. And then there was a man named Willie Aaron who still lived there. They would go to church like every two weeks, preacher from Baton Rouge would drive up, hold a service. Sometimes it was just these two women all dressed in white with white hats for the documentary. They invited some of their relatives to come, and they did. So, the church was more or less filled up as it once had been every Sunday. And so, we were able to get one last church service filmed for the documentary. So, that's when I realized how special a place it was. And by now, I had read all of his work probably many times, and it's all about Cherie Quarters.

Every setting it's clearly based on Cherie Quarters. So, it's his inspiration. It's this place that even though he left when he was 15 years old, mentally that was still home and that's what inspired him to write I think, was to try to capture that place where he grew up. As I write about it in the chapter, The Friends of Cherie Quarters, it sounded like the impossible dream, but Suge's house was still standing. In fact, she was still living in it. So, it was in good enough shape to be lived in, and then it was right next to the church. And then right next to the church was a small shed that Ernest Gaines said his grandfather had built. So, those three buildings right together still existed. Then all the way down to the other end was Reese's house. And my idea was, first of all, Reese's house even then was in terrible shape.

It needed repaired drastically. And we even did a little bit ourselves like, let's buy a two by six and prop up the overhang on one side and that kind of thing. My idea was could we create a building in between these, on the outside looks like these buildings. Cypress grade, doesn't have to be painted and look new, but then inside it's more like an open space. We could show the documentary there. In my dream, Ernest Gaines cuts the ribbon, our first we gather in the graveyard to remember those who are no longer with us. Then he cuts the ribbon. We'll have teacakes and what he called [inaudible] , the kinds of things that people used to give him to pay him for writing a letter or reading a letter to them if they couldn't read, and then maybe a little gift shop where his books could be sold.

And of course, I couldn't make it happen on my own. It would take more people and it would take a certain vision to see a value there. But we brought people there. Greg Osborne, who's with New Orleans Public Library, Chuck Seiler and his wife Rhonda. We would take different people there and say, "What do you think?" And these were African American people, and they'd go, "Oh, this could be great." I mean, they'd get really excited about the possibilities. Sid and I together created the lecture, Cherie Quarters The Place and The People. He would talk about the actual physical components. I would talk about the people, which of course, starting with Ernest Gaines, the most famous person to come from there. We gave that lecture at least half a dozen times. We gave it Upstate Archives where I asked "Would everybody who has a connection to Cherie Quarters, please stand up?"

And half the audience stood up. So, the message was understood by the people who heard the lecture. I think people understood what we were trying to do. And like a title of the chapter, Time is The Enemy. All it takes is time. You don't have to do anything but just demolition by neglect. You literally don't have to raise a finger, and sooner or later, that building will be gone. So, we did as much as we could. We really did. We tried, but ultimately we failed. So in a way, the book creates what we were unable to create as a physical presence. And also I created a Cherie Quarter's Facebook group, and we've got 300 members now, many of whom have a Cherie Quarters connection. So in a way, the internet has made it easier in some ways, especially for people who have moved away. They can at least keep up.

Jason Church: Well, thanks so much for talking to us today, Ruth. I highly recommend anyone interested in southern history, vernacular architecture, African American history, plantation system, any of that, this book will check those boxes, and I highly recommend anyone go out and read it.

Jason Church talks with Ruth Laney about her book, Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People who Inspired Ernest J. Gaines.

February 28, 2023

123. Dutton's Dirty Diggers

Transcript

Jason Church: Hello, my name is Jason Church. I'm the chief of technical services here at the National Center of Preservation Technology and Training. And today, I am here interviewing Catherine Fowler, who's the author of Dutton's Dirty Diggers, a book that just came out about Bertha Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout archeology camps that were held in the American Southwest from 1947 to 1957. Let's talk about your book.

Catherine Fowler: Several of us had met, and we all felt that we owed a debt to Bertha Dutton. We're basically opening up the world of archeology and generally anthropology to us, and also the possibilities that we too could go into that field and we could have successful careers as Bertha had done just that through the University of New Mexico where she got her BA and MA degrees, and then also went on to Columbia to get her PhD and was employed at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe for almost all of her career. So, we thought that was quite neat. And at that time, the opportunities for women to go into something other than being a secretary or a hairdresser, or if you had an inclination towards science, you could be a nurse, but never a physician. So, she just really opened our eyes. And so we decided something more needed to be told about the program.

In addition, of course, she introduced us to a very vibrant region of the country that most of us knew absolutely nothing about, and many became so enchanted that they even moved there or had second homes there most of their lives. So, it was certainly a multicultural experience too. Bert was very well known among a Pueblo peoples and Navajo and Apache peoples, and they welcomed us. And we tried to act like ladies most of the time when we were in their presence. And of course, we visited lots of national parks, especially in the southwest because many of them contained very important archeological sites or now under protection, and were then, or some were transitioning to it. So all the way around, it was a marvelous experience. Some close to 300 girls went through it, including the two week on the road camps where we traveled to various regions of the southwest and camped out while doing so.

And there were sometimes several of those per summer. And then also the archeological excavation camp, which was held south of Santa Fe in the Galileo Basin at a site called Pueblo Largo. And there were six of those camps. They ran two weeks each, but only one in the latter part of the years that she ran the program. So all around, it was wonderful. One girl came back 11 times. Several others came back two, three, four, five times. I came back twice, but then the program was ended. I was in the last two years of the program. As a result, quite a number of us did stick with it and became anthropologists, and also others got PhDs in related fields at a time when women could hardly expect to get much beyond a bachelor's degree. So, we think that the program had a lot of very good results.

There were four of us who became very close. I had started the work with a paper, a visit to basically to the archives at the Museum of New Mexico Laboratory of Anthropology, and that paper was presented to the Society for American Archeology. And one of its meetings about the topic of the symposium was how the public can get involved in archeology, and I thought that that fitted quite well. And while I was there, I met another person who was beginning to work on the archives, the Bertha Dutton archives, which are at the museum and the archives there. And so we kind of linked up and thought, well, we'd at least do a monograph on the material maybe. And then that next summer, through a mutual friend in archeology, Alexander Lindsay, who was at the Museum of Northern Arizona, I met two more of the diggers. So, we teamed up and decided to push forward and do what we could to tell the story.

Jo Tice Bloom and I did most of the archival work. The other two pulled together some of their diaries. Suzanne Martin had Bert's little black books that had all our names in them for each adventure, and also I suspect a positive or negative evaluation of our behavior. And so she pulled together a roster basically of all the names that Bert had in her little books, and that's what added up to the nearly 300 names. Some others we heard about. We tried to contact a few, certainly those that became anthropologists, I knew of. And so they were partly involved, like Vorsila Bohrer, who became a botanist, but also an archeobotanist, and others. So, it was a collaborative effort on all our parts. And we certainly owed a debt of gratitude to the archivist at the Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures, Diane Bird, herself, a Rio Grande Pueblo native. And she bent over backwards to provide us access to the materials and help us out and wherever we needed.

One summer, we had a kind of get together with six or seven of us and looked at photographs in the collection, many of which were not identified as to who the people were, and we were able to help Diane with some of that. Otherwise, all of us worked together. Took quite a while. I think we started somewhere in 2007, and the book didn't come out until 2020. So, of course that includes a couple of years at the University of Utah Press, which did an excellent job in getting it formatted and getting it out. So, that's sort of the story of all of us. And two of those individuals have passed away already. Actually, three, Vorsila Bohrer passed away as well. So, there aren't many of us left, and I suspect not a lot left out there either, especially from the early years, 1947 or so.

I have a whole house full of not only the ones that I collected first were purchased, I should say. Of course, Bert cautioned us. There were no collecting of materials for many of the parks, including sherds or anything else. She was very insistent on that. But many of us fell in love with the Native American art of the region. So, I think with my $20 that my parents had given me as spending money, I bought a small Navajo rug, a basket, and a San Ildefonso pot. And the second trip, I bought a nugget turquoise necklace. But I know several of the other girls, Maryanne Stein, and also Susan Martin, had good collections that they accumulated through the years. So, introducing us to the art of the region, which is of course exceedingly vibrant and still attracts all of us. We did indeed collect. In fact, she knew the owners of trading posts that we visited, as well as the individuals in Pueblo communities.

And toward the end of the trips of which I was on, she would send out information ahead of time as to whether we might be interested in materials. And then she would advise us as to, "Yes, this is a good purchase. No, wait a while. You'll find better quality materials." And she always looked at the quality to make sure that we were getting something that was very nice rather than just particularly tourist art. Although of course, one could say that many of the materials developed as tourist art, and then went way beyond that, certainly to the present day. In the second of the last chapter, the sort of summary chapter, I think we pulled together data on about 60 girls, especially those who attended Bertha's, either her memorial service or her 80th birthday. And we were able to track them down through cards that are in the archives and find them and see what became of them.

And quite a number who didn't go into an anthropology, went into other fields. At least three that I know of got PhDs in history, including Jo Tice Bloom. And then Susan Martin became a biochemist and had a very successful career at that. Maryanne Stein got her PhD in anthropology, but also a law degree in addition, and worked in Albuquerque as an environmental law person after she went out of anthropology and into law. Others did become nurses, but often master's degree level rather than just a BA level. And many went in or stayed with girl scouting because they had daughters, or they knew of the value of the program in general, as a building program for confidence among young women, and the idea that they could do what they wanted, be what they wanted, and nobody should tell them, "No, you can't because you're a woman." We traveled in the caravan of vehicles. We had one male with us at all times, and he was the car wrangler. The National Girl Scouts, of course, course had liability and some medical insurance. Our parents would pay, I think it was a dollar and a half for a policy that would ensure our survival, basically. But I think that the Museum of New Mexico didn't realize perhaps what the liability situation was fully in terms of them because they didn't carry any specific or special policies. And I think today, given where we were going, how far we were going, how many of us there were the state of the roads in those days in New Mexico, all the adventures we had climbing into and back out of different Pueblos like Mesa Verde. We all climbed the ladders up into balcony house. And even the park service has become a little bit jumpy about that and other such issues.

And so, I don't know. I think you maybe could do it on a small scale. I know the Boy Scouts, they did do some travel adventures, but not, I don't think, on the scale that we did. Bert always pre scouted everything, so she knew exactly where the hospitals were, where the doctors were, all kinds of facilities. And we did have a certified first aid person with us the whole time. She introduced us pretty well to the desert. We stayed up above the Mogollon Rim. She not only told us about rattlesnakes, but also about cholla cactus and how to get that off of us if we ever had the misfortune of running into one, scorpions in our sleeping bags, and anything else that might be hazardous. She was pretty thorough in her training. Also, we had a botanist with us most of the time, who could identify the flora and fauna. That was also exceedingly useful. Bert also was trained in geology, so we got quite a bit of that in our travels in addition.

We had several adventures in different camps. And Morefield Camp flooded one time, and our sleeping bags went floating down the ways. We had to retrieve them and dry them all out, but we were prepared. We also had a lot of fun in addition. But Bert was quite clear that it was meant to be an educational experience, not just a fun in the sun situation. But teenage girls being teenage girls, we had a lot of fun too and did a few things that Bert didn't know about. She was a lot of fun, but also very strict. We knew who was the boss. We did and saw a lot of things that those of us who went into anthropology and other fields related to the Southwest look back on with great pride. Some of the greats in southwestern archeology were enlisted to speak to the girls, and they did. We didn't know who they were necessarily at the time, but in retrospect, we certainly found out if we went anywhere near their fields.

Jason Church: Thanks for talking to us today, Kay.

Catherine Fowler: You're most welcome.

Jason Church talks with Kay Fowler about Bertha Dutton's Girl Scout Archaeology Camps of the 1940s and 1950s.

February 14, 2023

122. Stewart Butler's Legacy of LGBT+ Activism

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hi, my name's Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Frank Perez: Frank Perez, the author of Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler.

Catherine Cooper: So could you tell us how you became Stewart's biographer?

Frank Perez: The very short answer is he asked me to do it and I said yes.

The more complicated answer is that I first met Stewart when I was researching my first book, and he was very gracious with his time and very knowledgeable and helpful. In addition to that, he and I just hit it off on a personal note and became friends. And I got to know Stewart really, really well when he and I and a few other people co-founded a non-profit organization called the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. And we would have our board meetings at his home, which is known as the Faerie Playhouse. It was the site of many, many organizational meetings for the queer community in New Orleans in the late 20th and early 21st century.

And Stewart, when he read my first book, he called and made an appointment with me. We hadn't really become that close yet at that point. And this really is what kind of cemented our friendship. He called me over to the Faerie Playhouse, and I got the sense that I was going to the principal's office because he took out a yellow pad and just went through all the things that he thought could have been done better or more completely, or little errors he felt that were in the book. And I thought, dear God, this man hated this book, but he didn't. He wanted to let me know what I had missed. And it was a little strange at first. I've since then learned that he does that often with people. He used to do that with his pastor. He would criticize the sermons. It's just what Stewart did. And he didn't do it in a mean-spirited way, he was just curmudgeonly that way. And at the end of that critique, he countered it, balanced it, I guess you'd say, with a lot of affirmation and love. And then I realized, okay, I can handle this.

And he didn't ask me to write his biography immediately. We got to know each other. And in the meantime, I had worked on a few other books. I published, I don't know, five or six. And somewhere in the course of all those books, he realized maybe he does know what he's doing. And he had mentioned to me that some years ago he had secured someone else to write his and Alfred's story. And that did not pan out, but that he still was interested in having that done. And I say, "Well, you've led a fascinating life. I would be more than happy to do that. I do have some other works in progress. But once I complete those, I'll be happy to tackle this." And he said okay.

And that is how I came to be Stewart’s biographer.

It differed greatly from anything I've ever written. And I've written a lot, but I've never written a biography. So it was an intellectual challenge, which was kind of exciting for me. I told him early on when we first started working on the book, I said, "Stewart, if I do this, I'm not going to sugarcoat you. I'm going to include the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything else." And he said, "That's the way it should be." And he said he trusted my judgment to portray him the way I saw fit. And so it was easy in that regard.

Alfred was his soulmate, and he loved Alfred very, very much. And you couldn't talk to Stewart about anything without Alfred being a part of that conversation, even years after Alfred had passed. And so, fortunately, Stewart had friendly relations and was on good terms with Alfred's remaining family, who he put me in touch with. And they were very helpful as well. And then Stewart kept every paper ever associated with his life, and that goes for Alfred as well, so that made it a little bit easier. But I did have to do some independent research on Alfred and the Doolittle family. But Alfred's sister and his niece were very, very helpful.

Stewart saved everything. I mean, really a biographers dream. He kept every letter he had ever received, seems like, anyway. He would often keep copies of letters he sent to people or ask them to return the letters back to him. And he had a big trunk and a couple of other boxes filled with just personal correspondence.

He had terrible handwriting, I can tell you that. But those letters, thousands of them. And I spent about 18 months just reading all those letters and taking notes. And probably over half the notes that I took, I did not need. The hard part was creating just an index for myself to know where to go to kind of organize everything. But the letters were very valuable because those were his thoughts at the time that they were written. And they were very, very insightful into his life and his thinking and his attitudes and his emotions. He struggled with depression, which he writes about and whatnot. So the personal letters alone were overwhelming, but the personal letters paled in comparison to his personal papers. And by personal papers, I mean papers from every organization he was ever a part of. And he was a part of a lot of organizations, just about every major queer organization in New Orleans from the 1970s on.

And by papers, I mean agendas from board meetings, minutes from board meetings, personal notes, membership rosters, internal organizational memoranda, you name it. He just kept everything. He also kept a calendar. This is before the internet, which Stewart never embraced even though he was alive when it was out. He kept a handheld folding calendar for every year. And I was able to go through, I guess maybe 25 or 30 years worth of those. So that helped clarify questions I had in terms of dates and places and times. And he wasn't just meeting with so-and-so, he would make notes. He was a very big note taker, which was, like I said, a biographer's dream. So the hardest part was just going through all that material and getting a sense of what was there, and then going back and culling through the notes I had taken and re-looking at this and re-looking at that.

And to me, it just boiled down to, does it advance the story I'm trying to tell, or does it bog it down? And I think I'm a pretty good self-editor, but I'm not perfect. So when I finally sent the manuscript in to the publisher, they had other thoughts about some things I included, so I had to cut and chop. So it was just really a matter of, is this really necessary? Does this add to an understanding of Stewart and his work? So that was the question I used, the internal metric, if you will.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of great stories that really didn't make the book. There was a correspondence exchange between Stewart and a friend, this would've been back in the seventies, about how to make homemade poppers. And for your viewers or listeners who may not know what poppers are, in the 1970s and eighties, poppers were basically amyl nitrate that you would break a little vial and sniff it, and it kind of gave you a head rush and a little high. And it was very popular during sexual activity. It enhanced the experience, I can say it in a G-rated way. And they still have them today, but they're different today. They're called record cleaners now; you just uncap it, smell it. But they were different back then, and it was like you had to know a little bit of chemistry to make them. And so there was this hilarious exchange of letters between Stewart and a friend of his. And the friend is sending a recipe and instructions on how to make poppers. And there are all these interesting little arrows and footnotes. Don't do this or it will explode, or there's a chance that this will happen. I mean, it was just hilarious. And there were a lot of letters that spoke to his sexual exploits, which I didn't really feel were relevant to the book, although I tried to include a few. And the publisher kind of ixnayed that. But yeah, I would say most of the more salacious material involving his sex and drug use. He was no saint.

I think first and foremost, Stewart's life is an example of how just an ordinary citizen can have such a profound impact on so many people and on the world in which they live. Stewart never held office really. I mean, he dabbled in politics, but he never wanted the limelight or the spotlight or the leadership position. He was much more satisfied to remain in the trench and do the unglamorous work and avoid getting all the credit. And whenever people tried to give him credit, he would pass it on to Alfred, because it was Alfred's money that enabled him to do what he did. So that speaks to his humility, which I think is an example for people. But just his determination and his commitment to social justice left the world a much better place than the one he found.

And I think it's a great example, and hopefully an inspiration, to just regular people to make the most of what they have and what they can do, so there's that. I also hope that the book inspires other researchers to dig deeper, because one of the things that frustrates me as a historian of queer New Orleans is the fact that no one knows anything about it. It's only in the last several years that people started writing and researching about New Orleans' LGBTQ+ history, and there's a lot more that needs to be done. So I hope people realize that, A, there is a lot of history here. And B, keep digging. So those would be the two main things, I suppose.

The organization that I work with is called the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, which Stewart and I co-founded with several other people. And right now, we have just put out a call for proposals for a book to be written about the people of color community, queer communities in New Orleans and Louisiana, because that is a major gap in the historical record. And the Archives Project has partnered with the Historic New Orleans Collection, who has agreed to publish the book. They're also going to give a stipend to whoever ends up writing this book. And right now, the challenge is finding someone to write that book. So we just got the call log for proposals together and we'll be publicizing that communities of color, queer experience, and history needs to be researched.

I will also say that I think there needs to be a book written on the lesbian history of New Orleans, because every book that's been written so far are written by cisgender, gay men. And I think a lesbian voice is important and necessary, but also a work or a book that focuses on lesbian history. Now, there is a book on second wave feminism written by Janet Allured, who kind of touches on the fact that many of the feminists in the seventies in New Orleans at least were lesbians, but the focus is not lesbian history, so I think that's one.

Unfortunately, much of our trans history is still in the closet, and I think that needs to be excavated. I mean, I could go on, but those would be the two or three big ones, I would say.

I've written the book on the history of Café Lafitte in Exile, but there are a lot of other bars that could use books too. Bar history played such a crucial role in queer history everywhere because it was the only place you could go to find like-minded people for a long time. And in New Orleans, we were a drinking town. We had so many. And just a book tracing the evolution of these bars and these spaces and when they were sold and what they became and the new names and what their owners were like and so forth. I mean, I think that would be a fascinating book. That could be a whole volume of books.

I would just like to remind people that it's very, very important to get our history out of the closet. And so I'm glad that people are reading the book. I hope they enjoy it. Even if they don't, it's okay because if we don't remember our history, we're doomed to repeat it. The events of the last several months, I think, really raise a red flag about the fact that all these hard fought rights that we won can easily be lost. And we need to be very vigilant about that. And I think a knowledge of our history will go a long way into inspiring people.

October is national LGBT History Month. And at the end of September, I met with city council member JP Morrell here in New Orleans. And I said, "LGBT history month is coming up in October. And the last time I testified before the city council, it was obvious that some of your colleagues were completely ignorant of some major events that affected the queer community in New Orleans. And I think you all need to come take my queer history tour in the French Quarter." He agreed to do that, but then he said, "Why don't you come and testify again before the council about New Orleans' queer history?" And I was happy to do that. I only had about 20 minutes, so I had to focus on something very specific. And what I chose to focus on was how horrible and homophobic the city was in the 1950s through the 80s, and cited specific examples and so forth. And all their jaws hit the desktops. I mean, they had no idea how horrible the city was. And a lot of people are like that because today New Orleans is so tolerant and it has this reputation of anything goes, but it wasn't always like that, for us anyway. So I would just encourage people to familiarize themselves with history and to support the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, which they can do at lgbtarchiveslouisiana.org.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Frank.

Frank Perez: You're very welcome.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Frank Perez about Stewart Butler and his LGBT+ and Civil Rights activism.

of 16

Contact Us

Episodes

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Tags